Digital video systems generally communicate a sequence of digital images from a source, such as a camera, to a destination, such as a display. The communication can be directly from a camera to a live display or the communication can be time delayed by storing the video and displaying it at a later time. The digital images may be compressed or communicated in their native format.
A problem with real-time encoding is that it is difficult to plan usage of bit rate over time since one does not have information about the future. Bursts in the communication, i.e. peaks of high bit rate in the transmission of the digital images from the source to the destination can occur and be difficult to foresee. There is thus a need for methods for encoding video in real-time that enable planning of use of bit rate.